Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Prepared Eulogy

"If you start counting
now," my mother would say, as we waited in the car park, "he's sure
to be with us before you reach one hundred." We would start, each number
intoned teasingly so as to tempt my father to turn up. It seemed to us, as
children, that we could verifiably influence the duration of our wait: before
my sisters and I got to one hundred, usually towards the higher nineties, my
father, commuting back from work, would emerge from the train station.Once, in life, my father
failed to come back,Delaying with demurrage in
death.Homing, had we counted
hundreds more,As inveiglers of schedulers,
of rail trackAnd of fate, and appealed
under breathIn thousands, then, to a
causal law,We could not have delivered
him to emerge.He left work when it was
dark, timelyFor his tube, were he only to
carveA thoroughfare over the verge
– small verge,Might as well have been a
steppe, that heExpected would trim or even
halveHis journey, but he strode
into a crossbar,Horizontal, hidden and head
high,Which split his spectacles at
the ridge.While he journeyed across
that verge, veering farAs the hospital, for
stitches, IWas counting fruitlessly to
abridgeHis journey home.